Tommy Guns And Toys

“Public Enemies” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties—not a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like “Bonnie and Clyde” but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade. The scowling men in long dark coats and hats, led by the fashion-plate bandit John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), march into a grand Midwestern bank with marble floors and brass railings, take over the place, throw the cash in bags, and make their getaway, jumping onto the sideboards of flat-topped black Fords—beautiful cars with curved grilles and rounded headlights that stand straight up from the cars’ bodies. It’s the American poetry of crime. Throughout the movie, blazing tommy guns emit little spearheads of flame, just as in a comic book. Men get their skulls bashed with gun butts, and get thrown out of cars, but, despite all the violence, the movie is aesthetically shaped and slightly distanced by the pictorial verve of gangland effrontery—the public aggression that Mann makes inseparable from high style. He keeps the camera moving, and the editing (by Paul Rubell and Jeffrey Ford) reinforces the speed without jamming ragged fragments together in the manner of hack filmmaking. As a piece of direction, “Public Enemies” is often breathtakingly fast, but it’s always lucid.

The high-definition digital images are crisply focussed, and much of the movie (in contrast to the usual shock-and-awe thunder of action films) is on the quiet side. Billie Holiday’s plaintive tones show up on the soundtrack, a touch of melancholy high civilization amid the mayhem. Some of the dialogue is spoken sotto voce—in a darkened restaurant, say, or the back of a car, where suave hoods lean toward each other, exchanging confidences. Like Barry Levinson’s “Bugsy,” the picture happily exploits what movies can do to create a sinful nexus between criminality and elegance. Dillinger himself went to the movies on the last night of his life (an event recreated here); at times, he seemed to be modelling himself on the dapper William Powell. Most of the thugs, and the lawmen, too, dress in perfectly tailored suits and wear their pomaded hair swept back, like the grilles of those fast cars. There’s almost an unspoken compact between director and audience in a movie like this, a compact of pleasure in everything looking so good. Twenty-five years ago, in “Miami Vice,” Michael Mann brought visual glamour to television; he’s still an incomparable maker of svelte, flawlessly integrated images.

Yet, for all its skill, “Public Enemies” is not quite a great movie. There’s something missing—a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is. The bank robber had a brief run as a national figure. Paroled after nearly nine years in the Indiana pen, on May 10, 1933, he rampaged his way around the country, often living openly in Chicago and smaller cities, and was shot dead by a variety of cops and agents fourteen months later, on July 22, 1934. As the movie tells it (Mann wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, adapting Bryan Burrough’s 2004 book, also called “Public Enemies”), Dillinger was a gentleman thug, loyal to his friends and to his hat-check girlfriend, Billie Frechette, played by Marion Cotillard with a combination of desperate hope and fear that is enormously appealing. Relaxed and assured, Depp, with his fine, sharply cut features and lithe body, turns Dillinger into a supremely confident young man. “What do you want?” Cotillard asks him. “Everything, right now,” he says. It’s the quintessential movie gangster’s demand, although Depp speaks softly, without the snarling boastfulness of the great actors (Paul Muni, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson) who played gangsters when Dillinger was alive. There’s a faint tone of mockery in Depp’s mildness, in his secret half smile, though his face can darken with rage. Mann and Depp’s idea of Dillinger as an unruffled prince of crime is extremely enjoyable. Yet, as the movie goes on, you begin to question whether it makes much sense.

“Public Enemies” chronicles not only Dillinger’s wild fourteen months but the parallel rise of organized crime (represented as an Italian gent in a dressing gown giving orders on the telephone) and also the development of a national crime-fighting force—a nascent F.B.I. Billy Crudup, who has done inventive work onstage in recent years, returns to the movies with a brilliant piece of high comedy. His cheekbones built up, his handsome features on the verge of disappearing into jowls, he plays the young but already insufferable J. Edgar Hoover as a bullying, righteous, and wary man, a natural-born populist authoritarian. One of Mann’s wittiest accomplishments is to recapture the stiffly formal side of official life in the thirties, the pompous tone of bureaucracy and media, too—the sound of a newly powerful country trying to impress itself with its own importance. Special Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), whom Hoover puts in charge of the Dillinger hunt, acts out the role of a formidable national guardian. In the past, Bale’s guttural delivery, as if his vocal chords were soaked daily in testosterone, never seemed anything but an actor’s trick. He’s a tight, dour, minimalist performer, not very likable. But he’s effective here as a man driven by a single purpose—to see Dillinger dead, one way or another. Bale makes Purvis very still, very concentrated, the frightening embodiment of the Law.

Outgunned at first by the criminals, Purvis, with Hoover pretending not to notice, hires some trained killers from Oklahoma and Texas. The rival gangs of outlaws and “lawmen” duel back and forth, and the movie rushes through increasingly vicious gun battles and narrow escapes for Dillinger and his friends. Some of the shoot-outs—especially a mad nighttime pursuit of the irrepressibly gun-happy Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham)—are as flamboyant and as satisfying as a dream. But Mann, oddly, doesn’t seem to take sides. In “Bonnie and Clyde,” we were clearly meant to warm up to the outlaws—not just to the two lovers but to the entire group, who became an extended, quarrelling family, and also folk heroes, in a Depression-era country both bored and broke. But Dillinger’s popularity is only hinted at in a couple of scenes, and Mann, as he did in “Heat,” divides his admiration evenly between criminals and cops. Both are risking everything. The movie is structured around repeated scenes of wounded men (agents as well as criminals) dying as they look into the eyes of their friends. Yet some of the dying men are barely known to us, and the device, though beautifully staged in each case, doesn’t have the power it should have had. The movie is emotionally neutered.

“Public Enemies” needed a charge of surprise, and I wish the filmmakers had more forcefully developed two ironies embedded in the material. For all of Hoover and Purvis’s talk of “scientific methods,” the new F.B.I. wins the war not by arresting criminals and sending them to prison but by massacring them. And Dillinger, as the movie readily shows, is deluded about himself. He embraces the future, but, actually, his time is over; the new crime syndicates dismiss him as a troublemaking fool. And although the screenplay keeps insisting that he’s intelligent and shrewd, the movie demonstrates the opposite. The character doesn’t quite add up. If he had been given a wild destructive streak, the conception might have made more sense, but Mann seems to trip over his own story by making Dillinger so self-contained and cool. The problem with casting a star as low-key and attractive as Johnny Depp is that you can’t turn him into a man who is, at bottom, a loser.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” directed by the stunningly, almost viciously, untalented Michael Bay, is much closer to the norm of today’s conglomerate filmmaking. Two sets of leaden-voiced, plastic-and-metal monsters, the Autobots and the Decepticons, having failed to settle their differences over a parking space on an alien planet, fight it out on Earth—with human beings, in the dubious form of the teen couple Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, in the middle. Apart from the frustrating truth that it’s often impossible to tell the warring creatures apart—both sets are huge, black, gleaming, clanking, with many arms and appendages—they obey no rules that would make their combats a struggle of courage against limitation and therefore worth caring about. Achilles and Hector had spears and shields. These things can fly, climb, knock over walls, bore holes, change shape back into cars or trucks, dance the cancan in the pre-First World War Folies-Bergère. There isn’t much they can’t do, and their endless struggles are redundant and undifferentiated. The movie rages on for a hundred and fifty minutes and then just stops, pausing for the next sequel. In the middle of the battles, the American military, in the form of recruiting-poster scrambles in the Egyptian desert, joins the creatures in destroying the Pyramids and other temples, columns, and monoliths. It’s all a rambunctious movie lark, of course, but if you were an Egyptian wouldn’t you be a little annoyed by the casual imperial thwacking of sacred places? ♦

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